Question

I have about 40000 records in that table that contains plain text and within the plain text, contains that kind of tags which its only characteristic is that they are braced between [ ]

the caption goes here

How could I remove those? (replace by nothing)

I could also run a PHP program if necessary to do the cleanup.

Answer 1

Try

$text = preg_replace('/\[\w+(?:\s+\w+="[^"]+")+\s*\]/', '', $text)

Note:

• there should be at least one attribute inside the tag (eg., , just will not match)
• attributes must be inside double quotes ("attachment_2948")
• there is no \" inside the attributes quotes (this will not work – "attachme\"nt_2948")
• you can have [] inside the attributes (eg., goes here"])
• and make sure you did database backup before changing anything.